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It’s a self-serving suggestion and everyone in the room knows it, knows precisely what three obsessed men are angling for under the bland logic of patient safety.

But it’s also airtight, and that’s the trap of it—the cameras did fail, the counts did fail, the institution’s every system left her bleeding on a cafeteria floor, and the only thing in this building that got to her in time was a prisoner who broke every rule to be there.

I watch Hale’s frown carve deeper as she fails to find the flaw, and the deepening is its own answer:I’m making sense, and she despises such.

Across the bed, Doc doesn’t look at me, but I catch the faint thing his mouth does—the ghost of approval he’d never admit to, the look of a man watching a clumsy instrument play exactly the right note by accident. He won’t say it. He doesn’t have to.

The three of us have wanted the same impossible thing since the day we each walked into her orbit, and I’ve just handed the institution a reason to gift-wrap it and call it protocol. A pack assignment.

One of us, always, at her side.

The cage she built to keep everyone out, about to be staffed by the only three men determined to stay in.

She says nothing at all. She simply turns on her heel and stalks out of the medbay, the door hissing shut behind her stiff retreating spine.

And in the quiet she leaves, over the steady metronome of the heartbeat we dragged back into the world, I hear Silas’s low, delighted chuckle from the foot of the bed.

“Our growling brother,” he murmurs, “is a fucking genius.”

CHAPTER 10

~Vex~

Imust be surfacing from something—an overdose, a hallucinogen, the soft chemical fog of a body fighting to flush a poison—because I’m drowning, and the past is the water, and it has decided to haunt me like a plague that knows my name.

One moment I’m a ballerina.

Center stage, spine drawn long, every muscle obedient and gorgeous, performing perfection to a world that wanted me perfect—the version of me that existed before everything, the girl who believed the discipline of the body was a kind of prayer.

The lights are warm. The applause is real.

Then the stage tilts, the way stages do in fever, and the warm theatre lights curdle into something neon and low and sticky.

Now I’m on a pole.

Spinning to a beat that pounds through the floor and up through my bones, and the applause has gone wrong—craving whistles, the wet desperate shouts of drunk Alphas who paid for the privilege of believing I belong to them for the length of a song, money raining down through the dirty light while I climband arch and smile the smile that keeps the worst of them at arm’s length. I learned the pole here, in rooms like this.

Learned a lot of things in rooms like this. The body is still a prayer; it’s just that someone else collects the offering now.

Then I’m running.

Fighting, lungs tearing, the corridor narrowing to a dead end, and I turn at the wall to face the man who owns the deed to me—the man who told me, in that reasonable voice the worst ones always have, that I’d always be his because he paid good money for my freedom and a girl has to earn a debt like that. His face won’t hold still in the fever.

It keeps trying to become a face I burned.

This is the part of me no file holds.

No assessor ever dug deep enough to find the girl beneath the arsonist, the prodigy beneath the patient, the long ugly ladder I climbed down before I ever started climbing back up. They wrote lunatic and closed the folder, and I let them, because the truth is a weapon and I never hand my weapons to people who’d use them on me.

Yet, the fever doesn’t care what I’ve sealed away. It simply opens every drawer at once and spreads the whole inventory out for me to drown in—the stage, the pole, the deed, the debt—every rung of the descent, in order, in flames.

And under all of it, dragging at me, the heat.

It’s unbearable.

A fever haze that won’t break, pressing down until I whimper with the sheer affronted annoyance of it, because I have always run cold and clean and I do not consent to cooking in my own skin. I’d gladly stay down here drowning forever if only the water would stay frigid, if the cold would just hold—but the heat keeps rising, endless, no shore in sight, and I’m beginning to think the burning is the point, that the fire I walked away from has finally caught up to finish the job?—

Something cold presses against my forehead.